


bright dot defects

by Deanon



Category: Electronic Dance Music RPF
Genre: M/M, Pining, Touring, gratuitous electronic imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-02
Updated: 2017-06-02
Packaged: 2018-11-08 04:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11073981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deanon/pseuds/Deanon
Summary: it was once thought that the moment between the F and G chords was sacred.





	bright dot defects

**Author's Note:**

> Standard RPF warnings. Also, I know next to nothing about touring or the process of making electronic music.

Madness is a stuck pixel.

Everything changing around it and it, static, shows part of an image long gone.

When he was younger he'd ruined his first computer screen by learning to shut the screensaver off, and then leaving it on all night. His desktop had been burned into it, visible even after his parents had unplugged it and were carrying it out of the room.

He remembered thinking, _this is what it is to remember_ , and carrying that around with him long after the specific memory of that screen had faded.

Years later, his phone has a stuck pixel in the corner. He could fix it, probably - definitely - but he leaves it. Runs his finger over it when he pulls his phone out of the pocket to check the time and sees a text there - from his mother, from Dillan, from Porter.

It makes it his phone, and he keeps it for years, until Porter steals it so often on tour that Porter starts running his thumb over it, too.

Hugo doesn't think he even realizes what he's doing.

* * *

 

He doesn't realize it when they're writing _Shelter_.

He notices, of course, that it seems too natural for Porter to be in his childhood home. They sit in his studio, opposite sides, fiddling with samples and plugging and unplugging headphones to seamlessly work together and separately, and it feels like a natural extension of what they've done for years. "What do you think of - "

"It might be too repetitive, it needs to build more - "

"I like that bass line, what if you -"

"No, the part that's like - " and Porter humming a line in the song, the way it goes just a touch quieter the only sign of his own embarrassment.

Hugo looks at Porter, and Porter looks at his computer screen, and the moment to tease him comes and goes - or was perhaps never there at all - so Hugo just says, "Ah, that," and skips his track back to hear what Porter hears.

It feels like this is what they should have been all along, and it flows so seamlessly that Hugo doesn't feel the break until Porter is back on a plane, and his studio feels incomplete in a way it never has before.

* * *

 

He doesn't realize it when the tour starts.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say he notices too much; he's been on tour before but not like _this_. The stage is centered on them, the interplay, the reworks and remixes and the roar of the crowd and in his ears when Porter pulls the mic close and sings words that Hugo wrote. He hears his own songs for the first time.

They fall into each other's orbits at after-parties. Hugo's never been touch-shy but Porter is, a bit, and he's able to blame that surprise on the shiver that runs up his spine when Porter leans in to whisper in his ear or just place a hand on his shoulder.

The way he touches back, though - the playful tug of Porter's beanie, the excuse to touch his hair, the adrenalin-wild smile - he has no excuse for that.

But everything is too-intense in the first few shows, and it fades, as days turn into weeks. It has to - they save their energy for the shows, sleep on the bus, live on too many energy drinks and constantly bounce ideas off each other during the hours on the road. It becomes routine, and so does touching Porter, a driving melody repeated so often it becomes a part of the backbeat.

* * *

 

Seventeen days into the tour, they are on a road in southern California and it's morning-bleeding-into-afternoon. It's too hot in the bus - it's too hot for him always in the southern US, and Porter makes fun of him for it but it's true - and Hugo's making iced coffee at the counter.

He hears Porter coming over, and moves on instinct to let him at the counter but still feels the short-circuit spark as their arms brush. Porter says, "So I was thinking, for the bass drop in Language - " as though it was a continuation of a conversation they'd already been having. Maybe it is.

He reaches across Hugo for a glass, and catches his eyes as he does it, breathtakingly close.

Porter smiles a half-smile, just a quirk of his lips at the corner, and it sticks in Hugo's mind and burns, burns, burns.

* * *

 

There is a before, and an after.

After - after the kitchen, after the image of Porter's smile is branded into him - their shows are different. Or maybe they're the same, and it's Hugo who is different. Maybe he hears it with different ears.

Static and moment of clarity: he forgets the moment that they enter the stage but remembers, vividly, the look on Porter's face when Hugo does something clever, inspired, with the hook. Forgets singing the first verse of Shelter but watches Porter form the words of 'Easy' as he falls asleep that night.

Goes through the whole concert in an energetic daze, high and nearly delirious on the music and their dynamic and the energy of the crowd, and coming alive at the afterparty when Porter reaches over him to play a riff on his Launchpad.

He wonders if it shows on his face.

* * *

 

He notices at their concerts.

Contact between them flashes bright-white like it always has but now he sees it clearly, an optical illusion finally resolving itself before his eyes. Porter's arm goes around him as they bounce on stage and his fingers brush the space where Hugo's shirt has ridden up, and his whole brain turns to static.

Words catch in his throat when it's his turn to speak. When he sings he doesn't look at Porter at all for fear that he will not be able to look away.

* * *

 

There are days off. Days of travelling between destinations, and days where they opt to just hang out in a hotel room and work on music rather than going out to another party.

There is Hugo sitting crosslegged with his laptop in his lap in a hotel chair. There is Porter sitting across from him on the bed, on his phone, listening as Hugo explains an idea he's working on for the crossfade into Easy.

"And then we take the baseline here and bring it up - " He drags the pitch - "And loop in the first hook of - " two more clicks, and it's done. He loops it through again, conducting along to the music as the melody transitions seamlessly. (The backbeat doesn't work yet but he can fix that, in a minute.)

He looks up and Porter's smiling at him, again. The same soft smile as in the kitchen. It makes Hugo feel as though he is looking at himself from the outside;as though a different person is reflected in that smile. Porter says, "It's good, I - I like the way you - " and then he gestures, vaguely, the sort of hand-wavy conducting that Hugo's always doing during shows.

"The - what?" Porter is still smiling at him. It feels like swallowing molten glass.

"Nothing," Porter says. "Here, play it back again." He leans over the bed to pull his own laptop out of his bag, and the moment passes. Their fingers tremble.

If Hugo could choose between noticing and not noticing -

A part of him is glad he doesn't have a choice.

* * *

 

They are close enough to end of the tour to count the days. They are close enough that each show ends with a stronger ache in his chest, one that he tries to breathe past and not take as an omen for things to come.

The mornings in the bus are still golden. Still too-close too-quiet affairs, neither of them morning people, both more used to each other at 2 am than 10 am. (Sometimes Porter's drinking coffee by a window and Hugo remembers, vividly, coming downstairs in France and seeing him in that same posture in a chair that Hugo had sat in since he was a child. It was the same day they changed the words to Shelter.)

Hugo sits next to him, on his phone, checking Twitter. Porter's humming the melody to _Easy_ but cuts himself off with, "Oh, hey, is that - ?" and reaches over and slips Hugo's phone out of his hand.

"Hey," Hugo says, but leans over to see the tweet about the tour announcement that Porter had clicked on.

Porter reads it out loud, and Hugo isn't listening, because he's watching Porter's thumb stroke over the stuck pixel in the corner, the same gesture Hugo's picked up. Like he's been watching Hugo so much that he's memorized the gestures of his hands.

Like a camera coming into focus, he knows.

"Porter," Hugo says, and when Porter looks up he leans over and moves faster than his own fear. He kisses him, and feels the way that Porter leans into it as though he didn't even have to think.

Like a chord resolving.

Hugo breathes out.


End file.
